Ballmer on release cycles

Microsoft’s biggest products, Windows and Office, are on much longer release cycles than many other programs in the increasingly Internet-focused software industry. How will the company adjust? That was the unstated backdrop for one of the questions posed to CEO Steve Ballmer at last week’s Gartner Symposium. Here’s what he said on the subject, according to the transcript:

“We’ve gone through a period where, shall we say, we haven’t had all the muscles working evenly. Our MSN team has been pumping rapid innovation into the market. Office has been moving every few years. Windows has had a longer gap between its major releases, with the exception, of course, of the major security release we did, XP SP 2. And I think the important thing we’re focused in on across Microsoft is how, through the combination of both products and services on top of those products, Internet-based services, all of our major businesses can have a short twitch capability, call that every six or nine months; a medium twitch capability; and at the same time we can’t stop doing the R&D that will actually take three or four years to get done. We just can’t make our customers wait three or four years for the things which should have been on more interim cycles. So, we’re trying to pace ourselves, not pace ourselves, but to orchestrate ourselves so that we have innovations coming on all three of those cycle paths.”

Later in the discussion, one of the Gartner moderators touched an antitrust-related nerve when he asked Ballmer what Microsoft would do during the next year to “trounce” its competition. “We don’t trounce our competition — we compete,” Ballmer corrected him. According to the transcript, the comment drew laughter and applause from the crowd.